Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-66
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Third ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Take All

Here I rebut three fundamental challenges to the idea that Jewish moral monotheism was a primary cause of German anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The first challenge is the claim that the National Socialist persecution of the Jews was based solely on race, and not on religion. The second challenge is the more sweeping claim that there was nothing objective about the Jews or Judaism—neither race nor religion—that motivated Nazi oppression and murder; these were simply irrational. The third challenge is what I call, echoing Hannah Arendt, “the banality of evil” claim. According to this perspective, most Nazis, including many who were very highly placed (e.g., Eichmann), were without evil intention or malice of forethought toward the Jews and were motivated primarily by mundane concerns, such as power or promotion or simple prudence. I take all three of these positions to underestimate human malice and, by implication, human (and divine) benevolence.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

The Nazi Empire

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Browning
Keyword(s):  
Total Mass ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
The Third ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Physically Handicapped ◽  
Slavic Populations

This articles addresses genocide in the Nazi Empire. Genocide in the Nazi Empire issued from a confluence of traditions: anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, and eugenics. None of these was unique to Germany, but they came together in a lethal combination in Germany under Nazi rule to provide the ideological underpinnings for three clusters of genocidal projects. The first was the ‘purification’ of the German race through the mass murder of the mentally and physically handicapped within the Third Reich and the expulsion and mass murder of ‘Gypsies’ from the Third Reich. The second was a demographic revolution or ethnic restructuring within the lands deemed to be Germany's future Lebensraum through the decimation, denationalization, and expulsion of the predominately Slavic populations living there. The third was the systematic and total mass murder of every Jew — the Holocaust.

National Socialism and Fascism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving Hexham
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Press ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The 1950S

To appreciate that the various forms of fascism, particularly German National Socialism under Adolf Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers' Party commonly known as the Nazi Party; 1920–1945) and Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF, National Fascist Party; 1922–1943), are embedded within modernism, one must first recognize that the reality and horror of the Holocaust has distorted our understanding of Nazism in three significant ways. First, until at least the early 1990s the crude anti-Semitism of National Socialists like Julius Streicher (1885–1946) and Johann van Leers (1902–1965) prevented scholars from taking seriously the notion that National Socialism is an ideology that intellectuals helped define. Secondly, because anti-Semitism did not obviously manifest itself among Italian modernists and fascists, it discouraged comparison. Thirdly, starting in the 1950s many surviving National Socialists, who were formerly passionate SS-intellectuals like Sigrid Hunke (1913–1999) (Poewe 2011) or like the head of the Press Division of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office Paul Karl Schmidt (1911–1997) (Plöger 2009), among many others, reinvented themselves.

Schoenberg's Symbolic Remigration: A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar West Germany

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy H. Calico
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Funding ◽  
West Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Musical Modernism

Abstract Musicologists have recently begun to study a crucial component in the reconstruction of European cultural life after World War II——the remigration of displaced musicians, either in person or (adopting Marita Krauss's notion of "remigrating ideas") in the form of their music. Because composers are most significantly present in the aural materiality of their music, and because Arnold Schoenberg's name was synonymous with modernism and its persecution across Europe, his symbolic postwar reappearance via performances of his music was a powerful and problematic form of remigration. The case of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw and the former Nazi music critic Hans Schnoor serves as a representative example. Schnoor derided Schoenberg and Survivor in a newspaper column in 1956 using the rhetoric of National Socialist journalism as part of his campaign against federal funding of musical modernism via radio and festivals. When radio journalist Fred Prieberg took him to task for this on the air, Schnoor sued for defamation. A series of lawsuits ensued in which issues of denazification and the occupying Allied forces put a distinctly West German spin on the universal postwar European themes of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, remigration, and modernism.

scholarly journals Braunschweig: A Historiography of Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katelyn McGirr
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Collective Guilt ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust

Reviewed through the theoretical lens of the Intentionalist and Functionalist perspectives, this historiography essay discusses ordinary Germans' reactions to the National Socialist regime, the prevalence of German anti-Semitism, the legitimacy of collective responsibility and collective guilt, and how memory and historical approaches to the discourses of the Holocaust influenced German collective identity.

scholarly journals Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts: Anti-German National Socialism in a Fascistogenic Milieu

Fascism ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-193
Author(s):  
Matthew Kott
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Socialist Movement

Aside from equating it with Hitlerism, there have been few scholarly attempts to define national socialism and specify its relation to the broader category of fascism. This article posits that national socialisms are a sub-genus of fascism, where the distinguishing feature is an ultaranationalism based on a palingenetic völkisch racism, of which anti-Semitism is an essential element. Thus, national socialism is not just mimetic Hitlerism, as Hitler is not even necessary. National socialist movements may even conceivably be opposed to the goals and actions of Hitlerism. To test this definition, the case of Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts [Thunder Cross] movement is analysed. Based on an analysis of its ideology, Pērkonkrusts is a national socialist movement with a völkisch racialist worldview, while also being essentially anti-German. The case study even addresses the apparent paradox that Pērkonkrusts both collaborated in the Holocaust, and engaged in resistance against the German occupation regime.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
German People

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

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